Kushiel's Dart (49 page)

I think it pleased Gunter to wait to evaluate Joscelin's progress. I was hard-pressed to track the days passing, but I think it was nigh onto two weeks before he put Joscelin's learning to the test. In all the time before that, he paid heed to him only once, visiting the kennels to greet his favorite dogs, tossing them scraps of dried meat to fight over. But for the glint in his eye, it might have been no more than robust Skaldic humor that made him toss one to Joscelin. I was not there, but I heard about it later; Joscelin caught the scrap neatly in midair and gave his Cassiline bow, forearms crossed.

After that, I gauged him ready enough to meet Gunter as a D'Angeline, and not the feral creature I'd seen him. We rehearsed a greeting, to smooth over his rudimentary Skaldic, and continued to work on the rest. When Gunter chose to acknowledge him, Joscelin was prepared.

It was a dim afternoon, on a day that had threatened snow, and Gunter and his thanes had idled in the hall drinking for some hours when he took it in his head to visit Joscelin. He took me with him, wrapped in fur, and with a few of his men went out to the kennels. They sang and jested and passed a skin of mead. When they reached the kennel, Gunter put his arm around me and shouted for the D'Angeline. Amid a swirl of bounding dogs, Joscelin emerged. He caught himself briefly at the sight of me under Gunter's arm, but kept his features expressionless, standing and giving his bow.

"So, D'Angeline, what have you learned, eh? Has my little dove taught you to speak like a proper man?" Gunter asked, squeezing my shoulders.

"I am at my lord's service," Joscelin said in carefully accented Skaldic, bowing again and standing at Cassiline ease, hands where the hilts of his daggers would have been.

"Ah-ha, so the wolf-cub does more than growl!" Gunter laughed, and his thanes laughed with him. "What will you do if I set you loose from the kennels, eh D'Angeline?"

I had given him a bit of thong to tie back his matted locks. Somehow, in rags and squalor, Joscelin managed to look every inch a Cassiline Brother. "I will do as my lord commands," he said, bowing again.

"Will you?" Gunter looked skeptical. "Well, there is water to be drawn and wood to be fetched and Hedwig has been complaining about the housecarls, so mayhap we have a use for you, wolf-cub. But how do I know you will keep your word, hm? How do I know you'll not try to flee, nor assault us in our sleep if I give you half a chance? I've not men to waste, setting a guard on you all day!"

It was too much Skaldic too fast; I saw Joscelin blink in consternation. "He wants your word that you'll not try to escape nor attack the steading," I said in D'Angeline.

Joscelin thought. "Tell him this," he said to me. "While he keeps you safe, I will protect and serve this . . . steading ... as if it were my own. I will do aught he asks, save turn on my own people, unless they be d'Aiglemort's men. This I swear, upon my oath."

I repeated his words to Gunter in Skaldic, slowly,
so
that Joscelin could follow the gist of it and nod agreement. Gunter scratched his chin.

"He has a mighty hatred for Kilberhaar," he said thoughtfully. "So much I fear he may choose vengeance over honor, no matter how he swears. What do you say, little dove? Will the wolf-cub honor his oath?"

"My lord," I said honestly, "he is more bound by this oath than words can compass. Mountains will fall and cattle will fly before he breaks it."

"Well, then." Gunter grinned at Joscelin. "It seems my dove has tamed the wolf, where all my dogs have failed. I will give you one night to say farewell to your new friends, and in the morning we will see what kind of servant you make."

The Cassiline followed the sense of his words, if not the exact meaning. He bowed again, then sat cross-legged in the snow, ignoring the dogs that milled around sniffing him. "I will wait my lord's command," he said in Skaldic.

"Is he going to sit there all night?" Gunter asked me curiously.

"I don't know." I'd had my fill of stubborn Cassiline honor, and despaired of understanding the logic that drove it. "He might."

Gunter roared with laughter. "What a man! Some prize I will have to show at the Allthing, if he will serve! The wolf and the dove, yolked in tandem at Gunter Arnlaugson's steading! Even Waldemar Selig might envy such a prize." In high good spirits, he urged his thanes back to the hall, singing loudly about the honor he would win.

I glanced back once. Sure enough, Joscelin sat without moving, watching us go.

FORTY-THREE

Boisterous and crude he might be, but Gunter was a man of his word, and he had Joscelin's chains struck the following morning. Knud, who harbored a fondness for me, took me to see it. I'd no doubt that Joscelin would keep his own word, but still, freedom was a heady thing to one who'd been kept in chains. He started briefly when the manacle about his neck was unlocked, muscles quivering with the urge to strike out.

But Cassiline discipline prevailed quickly, and he regained his composure, bowing obediently.

"Well, we will see, eh?" Gunter said. He jerked his thumb at one of his thanes. "Thorvil, you will stay with him today, and keep a watch. Let him do a carl's work. Only, give him no weapons, eh? If he need break ice on the stream to fetch water, let him use his hands. Mayhap when he's proved himself, we'll let him chop wood or somewhat."

"Aye, Gunter." Thorvil fingered the hatchet in his own belt and grinned, showing a gap in his teeth, knocked out in a friendly contest of strength. "I'll keep my eye on him, never fear."

From what I could see that day, Joscelin gave him no cause for concern. Indeed, he worked with a will, hauling buckets of water tirelessly from the stream to refill the cisterns of the great hall; no small task. Thorvil sauntered behind him, whistling and cleaning his fingernails with the point of his dagger.

And the women of Gunter's steading stared.

None of them had seen Joscelin, save for a brief glimpse that first night, when he'd been brought in at the end of a line, half-wild and snow-covered. They got a good look at him now. Filthy and disheveled, smelling of the kennels, Joscelin was still, undeniably, a D'Angeline.

"He must be a prince in your land!" Hedwig whispered to me, awed, watching him emerge from the kitchen with his buckets empty. "Surely all the men do not look so!"

"Not all, no," I said wryly, wondering how Gunter would contend with this reaction. One of the younger women—Ailsa, her name was—contrived to brush into Joscelin, giggling when he blushed and dropped his buckets. Of the two men, I reflected, Joscelin might have a harder time of it.

Gunter and his thanes returned from the hunt flushed and triumphant, dragging a good-sized hart with them. He was minded to celebrate and we had a feast that night. Gunter got roaring-drunk, but not so drunk he didn't have the presence of mind to have Joscelin chained by the ankle to a great stone bench by the hearth. At least, I thought, both admiring and despising his foresight, it was warm and indoors. Joscelin curled up in the rushes on the floor, exhausted beyond caring. Even if it hadn't been for his oath, I don't think he would have fled that night if Gunter had left him free with the door standing wide open.

As the cold winter days passed and Joscelin gave no indication of untrustworthiness, matters settled into a routine. One day, when Gunter and his thanes were out, Hedwig and I conspired to see Joscelin bathed. If I had been grateful for my first bath in the steading, I cannot even begin to fathom how much more so Joscelin was. We emptied the water twice, so filthy was it. And if I thought my bath had been well-attended, it was nothing to his. Women of all ages, from the giggling Ailsa to dour old Romilde, whom I'd never seen smile, crowded into the bath-room to peek at him.

The Joscelin of my earliest acquaintance would have died of mortification; now, he merely blushed and looked politely away, trying to preserve what little dignity they allowed him. Even the most retiring of the women, dark-eyed Thurid, came to see, shyly offering a clean woolen jerkin and hose that had belonged to her brother, killed in a raid.

He looked dismayed to see his grey Cassiline rags piled for discard, so I gathered them carefully. I understood; it was all he had left of home. "Don't worry," I promised him. "I'll see them washed and mended if I have to do it myself."

I spoke to him in Skaldic, as I tried always to do when others were about. His understanding had improved, and his speech. "I would thank you," he grinned at me, "only I hear talk of your sewing."

The women giggled. It was true, Hedwig had been teaching me, that I might help with the endless mending, and my skills were thusfar deplorable.

"I will mend them," Ailsa said slyly, taking the clothing from me and making eyes at Joscelin. "There is virtue in a kindness dealt to strangers."

Joscelin blinked helplessly at me, drawing his knees up further in the bathing tub to hide his privates. "Serves you right," I said to him in D'Angeline, then in Skaldic to our putative mistress of the steading, "Hed-wig, I would see him groomed, if you would loan me your comb."

She eyed him doubtfully. "See that he is soaped and dunked once more," she said. "I'm not minded to share fleas with Gunter's dogs. 'Tis hard enough to contend with them as it is." For all that, she brought the comb, and had the grace to order the others out of the bathing room so Joscelin could dress in peace. I combed his hair then, taking pains to ease through the mats and snarls.

It was strangely soothing, putting me in mind of my childhood at Cereus House. Properly washed and combed, Joscelin's hair fell, blond and shining, halfway down his back. I didn't try to bother with the Cassiline club, but twined it in one thick braid, binding it with thong. He endured the process with patience, for it was the closest thing to luxury either of us had known in a long time.

"There," I said, unconsciously falling back into D'Angeline. "Let them see you now!"

He made a face, but went out from the bathing room. If the women had stared before, now they gaped. I could understand why. Clean and groomed, he shone like a candle in the rude, timbered interior of the great hall. Seeing him among the Skaldi women, I thought, it was no wonder Gunter's thanes made of me what they did, if I looked so to them.

Having nigh emptied them with his bath, it was Joscelin's job to refill the house cisterns. He did it with quiet grace, making trek after trek with the yolked buckets across his shoulders, stamping the snow from his boots before he entered the hall.

Ailsa, sewing in a corner, watched him and smiled.

If Gunter had not noticed before, he noticed it that night. He remarked on it to me as we lay in bed, afterward. It had surprised me, that he liked to talk after pleasure, when he'd not drunk heavily before it.

"He is pleasing to the women, your D'Angeline," he mused. "What do they see, so, in a beardless boy?"

So that was why he thought Joscelin a boy still. "We do not grow hair like the Skaldi," I said to him. "Some of the old lines, where the blood of Elua and his Companions runs strong, grow none on the face. Joscelin is a man grown. Perhaps women are less easily misled than men in this," I added, smiling.

But Gunter was in no mood to be teased. "Does Hedwig find him pleasing?" he asked me, yellow brows scowling in thought.

"She finds him pleasing to behold," I said honestly, "but she does not make eyes at him, as does Ailsa, my lord."

"Ailsa is a trial," he muttered. "Tell me, is the D'Angeline trained as you are? Kilberhaar's men did not say so."

I nearly laughed, but smothered it, as he was minded to take it wrong. "No, my lord," I said instead. "He is sworn to lie with no woman. It is part of his oath."

At that, his brows shot up. "Truly?"

"Yes, my lord. It is true that he is a lord's son, but he is a priest, first; a kind of priest, as you know it. That is the nature of his oath."

"So he is not trained to please women, as you are to please men," Gunter said thoughtfully.

"No, my lord. Joscelin is trained to be a warrior and companion, as I was trained to please in bed," I said, adding, "Men and women both."

"Women!" His voice rumbled with surprise. "Where is the sense in that?"

"If my lord has to ask," I said, somewhat offended, "there is no merit in answering."

I thought perhaps I had annoyed him then, and he would turn over and speak no more that evening, but Gunter was considering something. He lay gazing at the ceiling, running one finger beneath the cord of Mel-isande's diamond. "I please you," he said eventually. "But you say it is the gift of your patron-god."

"A gift, or betimes a curse," I muttered.

"All the gifts of the gods are like that," he said dismissively, pinning me with his shrewd look. "But I thought maybe you only said it that I would let you see the D'Angeline boy, eh?"

It was hard, sometimes, to remember that he was a clever man, for all his Skaldi ways. I shook my head. "What I said was true, my lord." It wasn't, of course, exactly true; I'd no idea if Kushiel's Dart could be unstricken. But of a surety, it was true that I was its victim.

"So you say that I would not be pleasing to a D'Angeline woman who lacked your curse of a gift?"

"I am the only one with this gift," I murmured. "Does my lord wish me to answer him truly?"

"Yes," he said bluntly.

I remembered what Cecilie had said about Childric d'Essoms. "My lord makes love as if he is hunting boar," I said; it was not as much of an insult to a Skaldi as it would be to a D'Angeline. "It is a heroic act, but not necessarily pleasing to women."